Nicholas Meyer puts his Pacific Palisades home on the market
Screenwriter, film director and bestselling novelist Nicholas Meyer has listed his Pacific Palisades house at $7.3 million.
The two-story Cliff May design, built in 1937, has been his family home for 15 years.
Used for entertaining, family weddings and Meyer’s work, the courtyard-style house has nearly 7,000 square feet and sits on more than three quarters of an acre — plenty of room for himself, his wife, three daughters, an office assistant and dogs.
“It’s a house that allows one to do all these things and for a lot of people to be sort of swallowed up because the amount of the grounds,” Meyer said. “The whole house is built like a cloister, around a fountain, which is always going and is the heartbeat of the place.”
Among period details are archways between rooms, decorative ironwork on the stairway banister, the stairwell chandelier and beamed ceilings.
“The big public rooms — the dining room, den, living room and library — are all very much original,” he said. There are bay windows, three wood-burning fireplaces and “places to curl up and read.”
The house has six bedrooms and 8 1/2 bathrooms, but when Meyer bought it, “oddly enough, it didn’t have a kitchen,” he said. “There was an accordion-shaped room where servants were expected to produce miracles. So we built a large kitchen from scratch.”
The oversized kitchen has an island with stools, room for a couch and a breakfast table, and views of the patio. Other improvements the Meyers made to the house included a fireproof roof, solar hot water and pool heating, and low-flow toilets.
His favorite spot is the library, which he mainly uses for reading and listening to music “and where my model electric trains run around the top of the books,” he said.
“The first thing that put me on the map was my Sherlock Holmes novel,” he said of “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1974), for which he also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay. Meyer wrote two more Sherlock Holmes books following the bestseller and last year published his memoir, “The View From the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood.”
Among movies he directed was the 1983 TV film “The Day After.” After his first wife died in 1993, Meyer stopped directing to focus on raising his daughters. He has written and directed several “Star Trek” movies, as well as “Time After Time” (1979).
He recently wrote the screen adaptation of the spy drama “The Crook Factory” for Johnny Depp.
Meyer, 64, is selling now that his daughters are grown. “The house is pretty big at this point,” he said. He bought the property in 1995 for $1,841,000, according to public records.
Sandra Miller of Engel & Volkers, Santa Monica, has the listing.
